Tool of the Day: Amanda - Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver
(Server)
Amanda is a backup system designed to archive many computers
on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive. This package is
suitable for large amounts of data to backup. For smaller solutions
take a look at afbackup, tob, ...
Features:
* will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk,
blasting finished dumps one by one to tape as fast as we can write files
to
tape. For example, a ~2 Gb 8mm tape on a ~240K/s interface to a host
with a large holding disk can be filled by Amanda in under 4 hours.
* built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, and
later GNU Tar and others.
* does simple tape management: will not overwrite the wrong tape.
* supports tape changers via a generic interface. Easily customizable
to any type of tape carousel, robot, or stacker that can be controlled
via the unix command line.
* for a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper
backup image on the tape for you.
* recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.
* reports results, including all errors in detail, in email to operators.
* will dynamically adjust backup schedule to keep within constraints:
no more juggling by hand when adding disks and computers to network.
* includes a pre-run checker program, that conducts sanity checks
on both the tape server host and all the client hosts (in parallel), and
will
send an e-mail report of any problems that could cause the backups to
fail.
* can compress dumps before sending or after sending over the net, with
either compress or gzip.
* can optionally synchronize with external backups, for those large
timesharing
computers where you want to do full dumps when the system is down in
single-user mode (since BSD dump is not reliable on active filesystems):
Amanda will still do your daily dumps.
* lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.
For important notes, see /usr/share/doc/amanda-server/README.Debian.
- perl is needed for some non essential server utilities
- gnuplot is needed for plotting statistics of backups
- to backup the tape server, you need to install the client too
version: most recent stable release is version 3.3.2, released on July 25,
2012.
size: 3.8 MB to download, 11.7 MB when installed
home page: http://www.amanda.org/
regards,
dhanasekar
